Culinary medicine course

Despite overlapping scope of practice, few healthcare professionals outside of registered dietitian nutritionists are adequately prepared to provide sound, evidence-based nutrition education. Effective interprofessional practice and education are known to improve not only patient outcomes. but also job satisfaction. Still, few healthcare professionals are exposed to this paradigm before entering the workforce.

With this issue in mind, Behavioral Health and Nutrition instructor Kristin Wiens received a grant from the Center for Teaching and Assessment of Learning to teach NTDT 367: Culinary Medicine, a three-credit course in the Fall 2018 semester. In a “flipped classroom,” Wiens will utilize inverted learning, hands-on culinary skill development and case-based teaching. The course’s purposefully chosen teaching strategies will promote content and practical knowledge, confidence, resiliency and critical thinking skills.

This experiential, nutrition-focused course for pre-health profession students will help instill interprofessional values to better prepare the University of Delaware’s future clinicians for their careers in an ever-changing healthcare climate.

In future, registration for the course may be opened to other pre-health professional students such as pharmacy, occupational therapy and physical therapy, and perhaps adapted for the continuing education of health professionals to engage the broader UD community of practicing healthcare professionals.